The Coral Island - Genre and Style

Genre and Style

All Ballantyne's novels are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and The Coral Island is no exception. It is a typical Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, one of the most popular of its type, and one of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes. The novel exhibits a "light-hearted confidence" in its description of an adventure that was above all "fun". As Ralph says in his preface: "If there is any boy or man who loves to be melancholy and morose, and who cannot enter with kindly sympathy into the regions of fun, let me seriously advise him to shut my book and put it away. It is not meant for him." M. Daphne Kutzer has observed that "the swift movement of the story from coastal England to exotic Pacific island is similar to the swift movement from the real world to the fantastic in children's fantasy".

To a modern reader Ballantyne's books can seem "over-concerned with flora and fauna", an "ethnographic gloss" intended to suggest that their settings are real places offering adventures to those who can reach them. They can also seem "obtrusively pious", but according to John Rennie Short, the "high moral tone" of Ballantyne's writing is compensated for by his ability to tell a "cracking good yarn in an accessible and well-fashioned prose style".